The Return of Debra Lafave

Its been over two years since Debra Lafave first graced this blog. For those who don’t remember her, this is the Florida teacher who slept with a 14-year old student. While she was found guilty during her trial, the judge decided she was too pretty to serve time in prison.

Yes… too pretty… it makes the min explode.

She is out of her 3 years of house arrest and now she is serving 7 more years on probation. One of the terms of her probation is that she may not speak to any teenager without permission given before hand.

While she did only talk to th other girl who worked with her as a waitress at a restaurant, and all that was said was that they discussed Lafave’s personal life, but no details beyond that. She has been arrested and released, and had to promise for a future court date. She is now working as a receptionist for her mother’s beauty salon, and has been for the past month.

While I am no fan of Lafave’s, I do think what has been portrayed as workplace chit-chat with a 17-year old girl makes it fairly heavy handed to call it a parole violation. Hopefully that was all it was, but who knows, and who knows if we’ll ever hear the true story.

While I’m normally rather unrelenting when it comes to child exploitation of any kind, this new case is ridiculous.

Those on parole are normally expected to report employment changes to the parole officer, especially while under house arrest. Since officials in this case were aware of Debra’s employment, part of the blame belongs to them. Maybe all of it.

Just about everyone knows that restaurants regularly recruit teenagers to staff their establishments. How does one work side by side with a minor without establishing contact?

Restauraunt employees are expected to communicate and work as a team. Waitresses, hostesses, kitchen employees and management are always communicating with each other in order to expedite hot food and cleanliness expectations of the customer.

This case is a sham, as it would appear at this point that parole officials are either dumber than a rock, unrealistic in their expectations, or simply fell asleep at the wheel.

The Parole Officer could have rejected this employment arrangement altogether, knowing that contact with minors was an unrealistic expectation of this kind of employment. Instead, thousands upon thousands of tax dollars will be spent prosecuting a case where the arrangements were dubious from the start.